Doce me Latine loqui!
How did people learn to speak Latin as a second language in antiquity? It’s a simple question—but one some of us (even those deeply interested in Latin pedagogy!), may have never asked.
In this post I’ll introduce some ancient learner’s Latin—i.e. Latin composed in antiquity for people learning Latin as a second language—and gesture to why I think they’re exciting tools to incorporate into the modern classroom. I’ll show some student writing examples inspired by these texts, and end with a summary of what I take to be their unique pedagogical appeal.
But first: a bit of background on the exciting texts I draw from.
The Colloquia
The Roman Empire was a racially diverse, multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multilingual society. The Eastern Roman Empire, for example, was of course a deeply Hellenized society, and Koine Greek was the native language (and de facto lingua franca) of many in the Eastern provinces.
While Roman expansion led to native Latin speakers inhabiting new territories outside the Italian peninsula and having to learn languages which they hadn’t known previously, this expansion also brought about the need for colonized peoples to acquire Latin itself as a second language. But how did ancient Latin language learners do this? And what could ancient teaching methods and materials bring to bear on today’s classrooms?
Happily, we have evidence of what some of these ancient Latin learning curricula looked like, in the form of precious manuscript evidence of the ancient ‘textbooks’ used in ancient foreign language classrooms. The most famous of these are the Colloquia Hermeneumata Pseudositheana, recently adapted into a classroom-friendly, inexpensive edition by Eleanor Dickey in Learning Latin the Ancient Way (2016).
The Colloquia provide fascinating insight into everyday ancient language learning in the Eastern Greek-speaking empire. Despite their intimidating scholarly title, the Colloquia are fun, conversational texts on everyday life and situations—well-suited for authentic second language acquisition, even in contexts far divorced from their own. They look like this:
They’re word-for-word bicolumnar Latin-Greek translations—of simple everyday scenarios (colloquia), classroom scenes and greetings, classic Latin literature with Greek translations, poetry to scan, legal cases to learn, paradigms to commit to memory—and they’re surprisingly similar to learner’s materials used in today’s language learning classrooms (especially for modern languages).
Let’s take a look at a colloquium that describes getting up in the morning: a favourite for introductory modern language courses.
Student-composed colloquia
As we can see, Dickey has replaced the original Greek translation of the Latin with an English one. This simple adaptation to otherwise impenetrable scholarly texts makes them a wonderful teaching tool.
To demonstrate this, I’ll show a few examples now of (anonymized) student compositions that were written by members of my Beginning Latin class after just a few weeks working with the Colloquia last year.
Let’s take a look at some examples. Here is the writing prompt I provided them orally and on paper: Quid facis (tu) bene mane, ut te schola preparares? I asked the question a few times and gave students 15 minutes to write. Here’s one:
Ante lucem evigilāvī dē somnō, sed non surrēxī quia defessus sum. Tamen, iam sōl lucet, sēdī et aperī fenestram. Surrēxī et cubiculum exit ad latrina. Lavō corpus mihi, et deinde dentēs mihi. Nōn pectināvī, sed tersī corpus mihi. Deinde induī ornatus mihi, quia habeō inspectiō personalis in formatiō ientaculī [Some of our students have morning formation]. Ambulāvī ad triclinium et ientaculī edit. Hic est subtum ordinem mane cotidiē sed non in diēs Iovis et in biduō. In Diēs Iovis et biduō, dormīvī ad horam meridianam.
It goes without saying that this is an exceptional response—but in my class of about 12, the majority of responses were powerful testaments to the enduring efficacy of these ancient teaching tools. Almost all students showed clear evidence of solidly novice levels of communicative Latin proficiency.
I read the colloquia with students, acted out scenes with them, had them perform declamations De evigilatione—in short, I tried to have the students engage with them in as many ways as I could to make them come alive. They show amazing retention, comprehension, and natural application of the routines described in the colloquium to their own lives on campus.
Here’s two more (both at a slightly lower level of proficiency, but still very impressive for students with roughly 10 weeks of formal Latin instruction and input):
- In mane, eo latrina ad lavō capūt ad corpus mihi. Deinde lāvī me, lāvō dentēs mihi ad fēcī capillōs. Deinde lavos dentēs mihi. Eō ab cubiculum et accepī ornatus mihi. Lavī cubiculum mihi. Accēpī paenula, et eō in formatione ientaculī. Post ientaculum eo classēs ad dice Latine.
- Ante lucem surgo de lecto. Lavo corpus mihi. Lavo dentes mihi. Induo ornatus mihi. Processi ab insulis. Eo ab culinae. Edo cibo. Eo ab classem.
I was thoroughly impressed with my students’ ability to express themselves cogently and comprehensibly in simple Latin on these rehearsed topics. They clearly remembered how the Colloquia texts sought to convey meaning and applied it to their own lived experiences those mornings. And of course they showed amazing natural facility in their composition, declining and conjugating remarkably well with just a few short weeks of instruction.
Takeaways: colloquia in the curriculum
We’ve now seen some of the evidence of the ways these texts inspire today’s Latin learners in a Beginning Latin course. I’ll quickly summarize what I take the unique pedagogical appeal of these texts to be:
First, they’re excellent source material for everyday Roman culture and practice, written at a time when those practices were still widespread. They’re ‘authentic’ texts—written by native Latin speakers of antiquity—but for ancient language learners. This makes them unique pedagogical tools for the Latin teacher.
Second, they’re adaptable. The way they were designed encourages teachers to manipulate the texts for their own students, and students, in turn, to adapt them to their own lives.
Third, they vary in content and pedagogical approach. Some fall more closely into the ‘communicative’ camp of contemporary Latin teachers (those influenced by Comprehensible Input theory and Second Language Acquisition) and others more in the ‘grammatical’ camp. So they should find a home in Latin classrooms of any pedagogical ideology.
Lastly, students respond to these texts and enjoy manipulating them themselves. The myriad situations help to keep them interesting for young learners—going to school, greeting a teacher, a school-fight, a description of a grand Roman banquet (convivium)—and provide numerous ways for students to add, delete, and modify the texts according to their whim and interest.
In sum, these are powerful texts—enduring monuments to the teachers who composed them so long ago. That they now live again—in all likelihood, soon to be tried in yet another format, in digital distance asynchronous classrooms and in real-time video conferencing—are amazing witness to the power of good, sound teaching that keeps the learner active, engaged, and in dialogue.
For more on bringing ancient education to modern student experience, see University of Reading’s Ancient Schoolroom Project:
Further reading
Corbeill, Anthony. “Eleanor Dickey, The Colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana.” Bryn Mawr Classical Review: 2013.08.34.
Dickey, Eleanor. Learning Latin the Ancient Way: Latin Textbooks from the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Learn Latin from the Romans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
The Colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana. Volume 1: Colloquia Monacensia-Einsidlensia, Leidense-Stephani, and Stephani. Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries, 49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Oerberg, Hans. Sermones Romani. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2012.
